The choreographer who influenced the history of dance in Germany more than anyone else to date was the much-travelled South African John Cranko. In addition to his own talent, he seems to have had an incredible sense for the talent of others. He led his ensemble in Stuttgart to world renown: the term “the Stuttgart ballet miracle” was coined in the US in the late 1960s. Among the outstanding dancers Cranko recruited for his ensemble were the Americans John Neumeier and William Forsythe.
John Neumeier, born in Milwaukee in 1942, has been Hamburg’s honored and celebrated ballet director for so long, and so many of his works have meantime become classics, even in the repertory of other companies, that people forget that he primarily modernized and shaped what is called ballet d’action. He repeatedly returned to and adapted great literary themes, such as Lady of the Camellias, Peer Gynt and Death in Venice.
Neumeier thus pursued the same path as Cranko, albeit in his own particular way, enriching the classical ballet d’action with a vocabulary of modern movement, dramaturgically purging it and making his figures psychologically credible, in other words more human. Yet he is also one of the most important guardians of dance history: John Neumeier has not only engaged choreographically with Vaslav Nijinsky’s life and work several times, he has also built up an internationally unique Nijinsky Collection, which shows the famous dancer and choreographer to have been a painter as well.
Neumeier represents one of the pillars on which dance in Germany has rested over the past decades: a cautious modernism that appeals to musical and choreographic traditions. The pillar that William Forsythe, born in New York City in 1949, has meantime built up in Frankfurt is totally different. One could almost say that he reinvented ballet, or in any case revolutionized its language.
Over the years, Forsythe explored the possibilities of the dancing body and of a deconstructed classical idiom ever more radically. In his choreographies, movement can develop in all spatial directions, out of all the joints. The Forsythe dancer spirals into the given space, teeters constantly on the brink of imbalance, tilts and out of that tilt creates the next precarious balancing act. Everything is out of kilter in this kind of dancing with the result that many of Forsythe’s pieces radiate a never before achieved vitality. Hand in hand with an often unconventional and highly effective use of light, darkness and stage depth.
William Forsythe’s influence is hard to overestimate. His intense style and his theatricality have found many imitators – and also influenced choreographers, who are finding their own individual and original way, despite the huge shadow he casts. As in the case of John Cranko in the past, quite a few choreographers working in Germany today come from the Forsythe ensemble. Like the two Americans, Antony Rizzi, who again and again stages radically personal pieces, and Richard Siegal, who changes and moves on from piece to piece. Siegal was initially preoccupied with the potential of video and computer within a dance piece, although technical refinements did not become an end in themselves. Now, under the heading CoPirates, he is seeking access to local networks, inviting them to carefully supervised and choreographed festive evenings during which the audience too can participate and dance along. Dance as a communal experience.
The Canadian Crystal Pite also danced with the Forsythe Ballet in Frankfurt, then returned to her home country only to come back to Frankfurt am Main a year ago, where the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, which focuses on dance, wanted to establish an ensemble of its own. Pite’s company became Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM and once again we can witness the development of a very individual hallmark. Crystal Pite reconciles the radicalism of Forsythe with other modern dance styles, makes the flow of movement supple. The dancing is stirring, but the basic tenor of her pieces is gloomy. In Dark Matters, which marked the start of her Frankfurt engagement in May 2010, she is concerned, for example, with the themes of manipulation and free will. In the first part of the choreography the dancers engage in an unsettling dialogue with a puppet. This work exhibits a theatrical imagination that is certain to add further facets to dance in the coming years.////
A Digital Dance Library
It all began with a choreography by William Forsythe, One Flat Thing, reproduced, which was recorded on video from different angles. Then, at Forsythe’s instigation, computer programs were written which made it easier to recognize the structure of that choreography. For example, the dancer’s movements can be made additionally clear by means of colored lines, as can the timing of their entrances, like in a music score. This is freely accessible on the Internet at synchronousobjects.osu.edu. Based on the same principles and with the help of other specially developed software, an online dance library called Motion Bank is to be created which can also be used by laypeople. Forsythe would like to take dance out of the “illiterates’ ghetto”: Motion Bank should enable interested people to teach themselves how to read a dance piece. Motion Bank is financially supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes; guest choreographers, like the US American Deborah Hay and the Brazilian Bruno Beltrão, will contribute works in different styles; specialists for graphic data processing are also involved, as are designers, dancing teachers and even a philosopher.
